Ep. 1282 - Culture Splits On Viral "Was That Person Real?" Video
A lady goes viral for freaking out on an airplane, St. Greta of the Blessed Sailboat gets arrested in Sweden, and CBS celebrates two dudes buying a bay.
Ep.1282
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A woman freaked out on an American Airlines flight over the weekend, and since we now live in a culture that encourages people to film people in distress rather than to help them, the poor lady has gone viral.
I'm telling you I'm getting the f*** off and there's a reason why I'm getting the f*** off and everyone can either believe it or they cannot believe it.
I don't give two f***s but I am telling you right now that mother f***, that mother f*** back there is not real.
And you can sit on this plane and you can f***ing die with them or not.
I'm not going to.
So what happened?
Was the woman having a psychotic break?
Did she have a few too many drinks at the airport bar?
Was her seatmate not real?
I don't know.
Seems unlikely, but maybe Matt's right and she saw an alien.
Or maybe, since Matt is not right, maybe she saw a demon.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I have very little interest in observing a woman's apparent meltdown on an airplane But I have a great interest in observing culture, and I can't help but notice, in this case, how different the reaction is from the last big viral moment that our whole culture embraced a couple of months ago.
A vagrant, violent criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, a man who had recently beaten up elderly men and women, walked onto a New York City subway train and threatened to kill people.
And our culture makers, our media, our political establishment, they treated that man as the most innocent, downtrodden, sympathetic breakdancer ever to moonwalk onto the F train.
An oppressed black man struck down by the scourge of white supremacy.
That ubiquitous, deadly scourge.
And then, this past weekend, a white woman had an emotional outburst and walked off an airplane without threatening anyone.
And she is now a universal object of mockery and derision.
A dumb, stupid Karen who should probably be arrested and put on some meds.
What matters about the airline freakout video is not whether that lady thought her seatmate was a real person or not.
More significant about the video is whether the viewers think the lady freaking out is a real person herself.
I'm Michael Knowles.
It's the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Speaking of viral moments, there's another one that's gone viral now because a mainstream network news outlet is celebrating a video of two men taking a baby.
And claiming it is theirs.
We'll get into that a little bit later.
First, though, I don't want to move off the lady on the airplane just yet because there was a major update this morning.
When I saw that video, I thought, look, maybe she had a few too many at the airport.
It's happened to the best of us.
But, what did she see?
She probably saw something.
She's clearly afraid of something, and because I recognize that there is spiritual warfare in the world, I thought, I don't know, maybe, I don't know, maybe she saw something that at least signified or symbolized something that might be real and genuinely scary.
And then, my associate producer, Young Jacob today, or was it Mr. Davies?
One of the two of them.
points out that there's a follow-up video by a guy who says he's the one who freaked the woman out.
And the guy turns out to be a face-tattooed Freemason who called himself Lucifer.
All right, so the internet has heard the story of the woman on the plane with the reptilians.
But thanks to her delaying the flight I just got home so now it's my opportunity to tell my side of the story as the guy in the hoodie.
So we're attempting to fly out of Dallas Fort Worth and then basically this woman, she sits next to me and she's clearly been drinking.
I'm minding my own business and sure enough she sees my hoodie that has the Scream Mason logo on it.
Put a pause right there.
I'm just minding my own business.
This, you know, Ben Shapiro, of every observation he's ever made in his life, his best one is the observation about face tattoo syndrome, which is someone tattoos their whole face.
They make a huge spectacle of themselves in a way that is really spooky and grotesque.
And then they just wait for you to notice it, and then they get angry when you notice it.
Say, what are you looking at?
What are you looking at?
I don't know, the attention you demanded.
That's what I'm offering you because you've tattooed your face in a way that is menacing and spooky and you've got all these occult symbols all over you.
And then you get angry at me for noticing the thing that you are begging me to notice.
Keep going.
And on top of that, she noticed my ring, so she started to ask questions.
Nothing dramatic, just asked me do I know what these symbols mean, why am I wearing it, what's the purpose, yadda yadda yadda.
And long story short, I basically just say, hey, I'm a Freemason.
I even briefly explained how I educate about Freemasonry here on TikTok.
Next thing I know, she basically starts to grill me about low-level Freemason, and that it's all Satanism, and that it's ruled by reptilians, and blah blah blah.
So I simply put my hood up and I started to ignore her and basically just mind my own business.
She starts getting louder and louder and then basically she's like, you know that they worship Lucifer at the top right?
So I looked at her dead in her eyes and I said, I am Lucifer.
I heard one individual laugh behind me so I figured somebody got a kick out of it at least.
She starts running up and down the aisles freaking out saying I'm a reptilian and then all this other stuff she's gonna get off the plane yada yada yada.
It doesn't show all the footage it just says that she's trying to get off the plane because of you know I'm not gonna say it here on TikTok I don't want to get banned but then also talking about how like I'm secretly also trying to take over the world.
So I looked back at the guy that was basically chuckling before and I winked at him.
So I basically whispered something under my breath saying that, eh, Freemasons don't care to rule the world, we rule the universe.
And I looked back at the guy that was laughing before and just kind of winked at him because he started laughing again.
Well, I didn't think that she could hear me, but evidently she did and it- That's a big joke, huh-huh-huh.
...further and then they'd link flight and so on so forth.
So moral of the story, don't believe everything you hear on the internet.
And Freemasons don't care to rule the world when we rule the universe.
So...
This was a twist that not a lot of people expected.
The woman, especially if we're assuming she had a few drinks at the airport bar, pretty much totally vindicated, right?
You put yourself in her shoes and you're sitting there next to a face-tatted up guy who's got a cult symbolism all over his body, who says that he's Lucifer and controls the universe.
I think she's pretty vindicated and justified.
Now, you might say, well, he's just joking.
He's just being ironic, and I guess my objection to that point is...
I think irony ends once you tattoo your face.
I think that's pretty much the end of irony.
I've observed on this show before that if you behave in an ironic way for your whole life, it's no longer ironic.
It becomes earnest because there's no way to distinguish between irony and sincerity.
I think the moment that tattoo gun hits your face, that's when the irony ceases.
I think you're pretty committed to the bit at that point.
And esotericists and hermetic sort of cults that worship illumination and all that sort of thing, I don't know.
If you're calling, if you're saying that you control the universe and you got the tats and the symbols, I don't know, you know?
I'm not saying I would have stormed off the plane, I probably just would have said a couple of prayers.
You know, maybe talk to the guy, figure out what he actually believes beyond all these kinds of slogans.
But maybe if I'd had one or two too many Rosés, like that lady perhaps did, I might have just walked off the plane too.
Okay?
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Speaking of the culture, Speaking of women who seem incoherent, and less justifiably so in this case, Kamala Harris, our Vice President, she has thoughts on our culture.
Well, I think culture is, it is a reflection of our moment and our time, right?
And present culture is the way we express how we're feeling about the moment.
And we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment.
That is a reflection of joy because, you know, it comes in the morning.
We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life.
And I think about it in that way, too.
Culture is the norms, rituals, and behaviors of a given people.
That's the answer she was looking for.
It's just, it's ninth grade English class.
When you haven't read the book, and you are in the honors class, but maybe you don't belong in the honors class, and you haven't done the work anyway, you say, well, you know, culture, where do I begin?
It's, you know, culture is an expression of our moment, and that's, and culture is How we react to the expression of the moment, and it's the moment, and it's joy in the morning, and well, I think we pretty much... Yeah, but do you have an answer to what that is?
There's something really profound in Kamala's circular and meaningless description of culture here, which is that our culture presently is circular and meaningless.
So, a keen insight about culture was given to us by the sociologist Rene Girard, who pointed out that culture is mimetic.
That we human beings develop our personalities, our behaviors, our language, our thoughts, our desires even by imitating what we see from other people.
And so a culture that values honor is going to Let's say a monarchy, traditionally.
That's a culture that places a high value on honor.
That culture is going to increase in honor and in the desire for honor because we're all going to be imitating each other.
Republics, traditionally, are understood as cultures that value virtue.
And so they're going to look different than monarchies, they're going to look different than aristocracies, and that's going to spread too because we're going to imitate one another.
The reason that you want the nice Rolex watch is not because you know anything about horology or timekeeping or Swiss arts and crafts.
It's because people that you admire and people who you would like to be more like want the Rolex watch.
That's how we come to even desire these sorts of Luxury goods.
And that would be one of the artifacts that defines a culture.
So all of that to say, our present culture doesn't really value much of anything at all.
We don't value honor, we don't believe in honor anymore.
We don't value virtue, we don't believe in virtue anymore.
We do value stuff to some degree, though actually Decreasingly so.
If you see surveys about millennials and zoomers especially, we don't really value cars anymore.
We don't really value having a house anymore.
We don't really value high fashion anymore.
We don't even value stuff.
We value nothing other than the satisfaction of our most human animalistic desires.
And so human culture starts to go away.
Anything resembling high culture disappears.
We don't have beautiful architecture.
We don't have beautiful art.
We don't have beautiful music.
We don't have beautiful customs or rituals anymore.
It's all just kind of base level, satisfy your sexual appetite, satisfy your physical appetites, not even with high cuisine, with kind of cheap nothing cuisine where we're just eating slop, basically, from fast food places or from impossible burgers or from what is Soylent milkshakes or whatever else you're going to have. from fast food places or from impossible burgers or from
So that that's an anti-culture perfectly expressed by Kamala Harris in the circular rambling because we don't have any sense of what we value anymore because we don't have any grounding in reality anymore and and as our society
Moves further away from grounded tangible reality into the metaverse, into virtual digital social media, into the abstraction of the self from the body, saying that our true selves have nothing to do with our bodies anymore.
As that happens, the culture is going to collapse even further.
And it's become almost cliche now to observe that we today could not build medieval cathedrals.
We couldn't do it.
We don't even know how they were built.
Notre Dame in Paris, the roof burns down.
We don't know how to fix it.
We're just going to have to replace it with something uglier.
We can't do it anymore.
That culture has been lost.
The apotheosis of that culture is the incoherent rambling that you're getting from now the Vice President of the United States.
Speaking of our culture.
And the fleeting aspects that could even define our anti-culture as it exists.
Saint Greta!
Greta of the Blessed Sailboat!
Greta Thunberg was just arrested in Sweden.
She was arrested for protesting fossil fuels or something, and they arrested her.
She's 20 years old now, by the way.
They keep pretending she's like 12, but she's an adult now.
And she was arrested and could be charged with a crime and could be sentenced to six months in prison, but she won't be.
Even the media outlets who are reporting on this, who are liberal and very sympathetic to Greta, are saying she'll probably just get off with a fine, and some of her big liberal backers will pay off that fine, and it won't matter at all, and she'll just go back to getting arrested next time.
That's because this protest, which presents itself as being opposed to the system, opposed to the established powers, it is actually part of the system.
Protesting is part of the liberal ruling order.
That's why the liberal ruling class encouraged the BLM riots a few years ago.
The riots were not in opposition to any system.
They were part of the system.
And protests have been part of the system for at least 500 years.
I guess about 500 years of modernity.
And you see that especially kick up in something like the French Revolution, which puts modernity into overdrive.
and tears down the order.
You see this in the Bolshevik Revolution.
You see this increasingly.
The protests that tear down the edifices of the old regime, of the old culture, of Christendom, of the West, they tear that down.
But they tear it down not in spite of the liberal ruling class that currently runs our civilization, but with the encouragement of that ruling class, because that ruling class is a liberal ruling class that wants to tear down all the old stuff, that wants to tear down tradition, that wants to tear down the church, that wants to tear down the family, that wants to tear down the high art, that wants to tear down all the that wants to tear down the high art, that wants to tear down all the stuff that makes
This is also why it's mostly futile for conservatives to engage in the same kinds of protests and activism that the left has been engaging in for centuries.
We occasionally try to do it, and it's usually half-hearted because it's just not really in the conservative sensibility to take to the streets and scream and yell in protest like we're Greta Thunberg or something like that.
But also it's not going to work because the system will clamp down on us.
The system won't clamp down on them.
BLM can go burn down the country for eight months.
System's going to, at the most, give them a little slap on the wrist.
St.
Greta can go make a nuisance of herself everywhere.
The system will not punish her, ever.
But, a Midwestern granny shows up to the Capitol Rotunda and takes a selfie, you know, next to Nancy Pelosi's lectern or something.
She's going into solitary confinement.
So, the system reacts differently, because they're...
The system is built for liberal protest, that furthers the goals of the regime.
Conservative protest, which is mostly incoherent.
The great strides that conservatives and proto-conservatives have ever made have not been won through activism in the streets.
Screaming and yelling like we're the Weather Underground or something.
That's not how we roll.
The greatest strides that the right, the conservatives, the people who are on our side of the culture have ever made are the martyrs dancing as the lions eat them in the early church because the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church.
That's a hard lesson to learn and none of us really is eager for that probably, but that's more in our sensibility.
We're not going to beat the system by being part of the system.
To no good end, because we'll just be rounded up and arrested.
And meanwhile, Greta will go down and hold another big show.
We're not going to beat the system by being part of the system.
It's one of the big battles right now on the American right.
Is we're recognizing that we have unknowingly imbibed and accepted so many of the Libs' premises.
This is why conservatives at least for the last 50 60 years have basically just been liberals driving the speed limit.
As I think Michael Malice has popularized that phrase.
Other people have said it too.
And that's true.
You don't want to just be liberals driving the speed limit.
You want to offer a choice rather than an echo.
Moving on from Greta, getting into famous children, there's a big update on Cokegate.
You know, you remember how they found a little bit of that old first son favorite booger sugar in the West Wing?
You know what I'm talking about?
You know what I'm saying?
I'm talking about that old Peruvian nose candy.
You know what I'm talking about?
I mean that Yale College baking powder.
Mm-hmm.
You know, cocaine!
They found some in the White House, and the Biden administration is doing its damnedest to bury it under the rug, bury it under the carpet, bury it up in the first son's nose.
But the excuses are pretty weak, which we'll get to in a second.
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The greatest interview show on the internet, many people are talking about it, Yes or No, is back with an all-new episode discussing the number one movie in America, Sound of Friesen, Sound of Freedom, with the movie star Jim Caviezel and Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard.
They joined me for tough questions and stiff drinks.
You do not want to miss this episode.
It's just a coincidence that many elites in Hollywood and big tech are also some of the harshest critics of the Sound of Freedom movie.
Does Michael think it's a coincidence?
I'm just thinking about it for a second.
I don't think he thinks it's a coincidence.
Don't give me the answer.
It's cheating.
It's cheating.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Master Kenobi, who says, Michael, your talking points are great and all, but your style never disappoints.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Glad you think I got that drip and that riz.
It is Tom Ford Friday over here at The Daily Wire.
I have gotten our wardrobe department to buy me very expensive Italian kind of clothing Which is great.
Thank goodness I'm married.
Could you imagine if I got this kind of a wardrobe, this kind of a drip when I was single, it would have been over, man.
It would not have been conducive to virtue.
Not a chance.
Speaking of things that are not conducive to virtue, the first son, Hunter Biden, visited the White House and then A little bit of that Colombian cumin was found, you know what I mean?
A little bag of that old powder was found in the White House.
And supposedly, we have no idea where it came from.
Initially, we were told it was always in the White House residence, so then you think it was the Biden family.
Then we were told, no, actually it was in a really highly trafficked area of the White House.
So it could have been anybody.
It could have been some tourist walking in, someone just getting a quick view of the White House.
Then we were told no, it was in a much more secure area of the White House.
You pretty much would have had to be a member of the Biden family or a cabinet secretary to get into this part of the White House without being fully searched.
So the White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates was asked about Cocaine Gate.
Here's his non-answer.
One more.
Former President Trump has made some pretty wild posts recently on social media.
One of them was that the cocaine found in the White House had belonged to either the President or his son.
Are you willing to say that that's not the case, that they don't belong to them?
I don't have a response to that because we have to be careful about the Hatch Act.
What I will say is that I have noticed there does seem to be some increasing frustration coming from that corner in general.
And I think it is probably rooted in the contrast between their substantive policy records.
Homina, homina, homina, I can't... The Hatch Act!
The Hatch Act is the weakest sauce answer you can ever give, as a press secretary, to a question that you don't want to answer.
The Hatch Act is totally fake.
For those who don't know, the Hatch Act says that if you are working in a government role, you can't engage in political campaign activities.
And everybody violates this thing all the time, and it's pretty much never enforced.
White House Press Secretary, the boss here of this guy.
She will frequently use the Hatch Act as an excuse not to give answers to tough questions about Joe Biden, but she was found herself to have violated the Hatch Act on at least one occasion.
I suspect she's done it on many more occasions because if you're working in politics, in any role, then you're working in politics and it's very muddy and it's a stupid answer.
Even if the Hatch Act were legit and were ever seriously enforced, how would it be a violation of the Hatch Act to comment on the illicit drug, on the narcotic that was found in the West Wing?
In what way could that possibly violate the Hatch Act?
It's just an answer they don't want to give because most people have a strong suspicion on where it came from and They know that the Biden family will never be held to account for anything.
If you can take tens of millions of dollars in bribes from hostile foreign powers by selling American influence and not face really any consequences for that, you're not going to face consequences for a dime bag of coke.
It's just not going to happen.
Okay, speaking of things that should be illegal and laws that should be enforced, CBS News just celebrated a moment on social media.
CBS News tweeted out This is the moment Ben and his husband, Aaron, met their daughter.
Is that how that works?
Is that how daughters are made?
Charlotte, for the first time.
Here's the video.
Aww, that's exciting.
Are you ready to meet your parents?
What's so telling here is the guys have no idea what to do.
Neither of them has the instinct to actually take, supposedly, their baby into their arms.
The nurse has to shove the baby at one of them and then finally, oh, what do I do?
I pick this thing up?
Because men and women are different and babies need their mamas.
And this is just so evil.
It's just so, so evil to deprive a child intentionally Of his mother.
Or her mother, I guess, in this case, because it's a little baby girl.
Off camera, by the way, without any of the music playing, without any of the sweet emojis, the little tearing up happy emojis from CBS News, there's a woman who's in a bed bleeding somewhere.
My colleague, Mered, here at the Daily Wire, pointed this out.
She said, There's a woman bleeding in a bed with nobody in her arms right now because that woman was treated as a commodity and this baby is treated as a commodity and now the baby will be denied a proper upbringing and her natural right to a mother and a father joined together in holy matrimony in order to satisfy the fantasies and very selfish desires of two men.
That's awful.
It's just awful, and it should obviously be not only discouraged, but illegal.
And this wouldn't have even been thinkable just a few years ago.
Now it's becoming increasingly common.
And having said all that, it's also important, I think, to point out these guys might not have known.
These guys might not know how evil it is what they're doing.
I think there are a lot of people Definitely homosexual couples, but even straight couples or single people or whatever, who engage in surrogacy, who don't realize that it is evil or why it is evil.
And so I'm really sympathetic to them because the baby is a good thing.
The baby is good.
It's a good end.
The means by which the baby was conceived and the way in which the baby is being brought up is evil.
And good ends do not justify evil means.
But in our culture that has completely destroyed its capacity for moral discourse, in our culture which says if it feels good, do it, is the only moral maxim, I have a great deal of sympathy for guys who just didn't know, and now they're in this position where they say, shoot, what do I do?
What do I do?
There are a lot of people who have not engaged in surrogacy who used to approve of surrogacy from afar.
They don't see the reality of it.
Then we see the reality of it.
And we recognize there's a woman bleeding off camera who's being used as a vessel for rich gay men.
And we realize, oh, that's wrong.
And then people start to think about it for a second.
They say, okay, why is surrogacy wrong?
I have a sense that it's wrong, but why is it wrong?
Oh, it's wrong because it's wrong to treat people as commodities.
It's wrong to treat people as things.
And surrogacy treats a person as a thing.
It's a great priest on Twitter who made this very simple logical point yesterday.
Father Matthew Schneider is his name.
I could be getting that wrong.
It's wrong to treat people as things.
Surrogacy treats people as things.
Therefore, surrogacy is wrong.
And that's it.
And while the conservatives were getting on our high horse here, and even many people who hadn't considered surrogacy very much are now beginning to realize, oh, this is evil.
This should obviously be banned.
But we can't just point the finger at the libs here and their sexual revolution, which has driven a lot of this evil.
We also need to point out that this surrogacy thing is also a logical consequence of making an idol out of capitalism.
What you're looking at there is not communism.
What you're looking at there is not merely the logical end of the sexual revolution.
What you're looking at there is capitalism.
Buying and selling Wombs and time, gestation, and bodily resources, and ultimately buying and selling people.
And that is evil.
It's the same type of thing as human trafficking and slavery, and it's particularly insidious and evil because you're intentionally depriving a child of his or her parents, and in this case, of a mother, which a relationship between a baby and a mother is so, so important.
Deeply, deeply evil, but it's a systemic problem.
It's not just the libs, it's not just the homosexuals, it's not just the sexual revolutionaries, it's the whole liberal system that has encouraged this.
Not good stuff.
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Take it away.
Hey, Michael, you talk a lot about how the DeSantis versus Trump race is about the original versus the derivative.
And I agree that if Ronald DeSantis is going to have a clear path to victory, he needs to reframe that contest entirely.
And the way that he has to do it is to convince Americans that this is not between the original and the derivative, but between the ultimate and the derivative.
In which case, Ron DeSantis would be the ultimate conservative president, and Donald Trump would be a mere stepping stone towards achieving that ultimate conservatism.
The way he needs to do this is by being an explicitly Christian candidate, by saying that all of his policies are going to be viewed through a Christian lens, and his driving governmental philosophy is going to be that of Christianity.
Conservatism at its heart is Christian.
So if he would do this, I think that he would make a big leap forward, and I would like to hear your thoughts on it.
Thanks.
I basically agree with that, and that question may have come in before I made a very similar point yesterday on the show.
That's true.
Probably the consultants around DeSantis might fear that a Deus Vult explicitly Christian campaign might hurt him with the supposed suburban moms or, you know, the suburban women and the moderate voters and all these kinds of people.
But I agree with you, it's really his only shot.
Probably DeSantis' only shot right now in this race is to run as Ted Cruz.
Which wouldn't work had Ted Cruz decided to run in 2024.
But because Senator Cruz has not run in 2024, Cruz ran as the Christian conservative candidate.
Now, Senator Cruz is more libertarian, probably, than Governor DeSantis.
Which, right now, that distinction would benefit DeSantis, given where the conservative movement is at the moment.
So he could try to run as the More traditionalist type of Ted Cruz, but people will poo poo that strategy because they'll say, well, Cruz lost to Trump.
Yeah, he did.
But we blur over a lot of the details in hindsight.
Had Marco Rubio dropped out before Florida, Ted Cruz probably would have been the Republican nominee.
Ted Cruz was very, very close to beating Donald Trump in the 2016 primary.
And he ran as a distinct figure.
Trump ran as this wild populist who totally bucks the system, who is not from the elite, who kind of attended one of the fancy schools, though he was a transfer student and he was never really accepted by them.
He doesn't come from old money.
He doesn't hop around to all the classic institutions of the political establishment.
He is not invited to nice cocktail parties.
Ron DeSantis did go to the fancy schools.
He went to Yale and Harvard.
And Ron DeSantis did serve in Congress for a while.
And Ron DeSantis has been a governor of a state.
And so it's not a knock on him.
I think he's a very effective politician.
But he can't run as that total outsider.
Ron DeSantis has support from a lot of the GOP establishment.
Again, I still don't think that's a knock on DeSantis.
I think they're just supporting him because he's not Donald Trump and he's the only guy who could take Trump out.
But that's something that DeSantis has to deal with.
And I think maybe the way to deal with that is to just lean in and say, look, I am going to be the candidate to the right of Donald Trump.
And he's starting to do that, by the way.
You're seeing this with a great ad from Casey DeSantis going after Some of the eccentricities of the left, hitting the left for going after conservatives' kids.
You're seeing this in the anti-Pride Month ad that DeSantis put out.
So he's starting to do that, but he's got to distinguish himself.
Because if it's a battle between Coke and New Coke, New Coke might perform better in the taste tests that are blind, but when you take the blindfold off, people are always going to go for the OG.
Next one.
Hey Michael, I'm in a little bit of a pickle here and I'm hoping you can unpickle me with some words of wisdom.
Throughout the month of June I posted a lot of anti-pride things.
Very simple things like men cannot be women, we shouldn't affirm transgender's mental delusions, and that the Rainbow Coalition will be the downfall of America.
My husband has two siblings who are a part of the Rainbow Coalition and they of course became incredibly upset about this and were screaming at me that I was being hateful and all sorts of other things.
It got so bad that they called their parents crying and so now my husband's parents are upset with me for creating this contention in their household.
And even though they agree with me 100% and have no issue with what I said, they don't want me to talk about or post these things for the sake of not upsetting their two children.
In the Bible, you know, Christ encourages us to be peacemakers as He is and that contention is of the devil.
My question is, where is the line between stating what is true and what we believe in and standing firm in the faith and not creating contention because we know that those subjects will upset certain people in our lives?
Am I responsible for the contention or is it up to the two children to control their emotions and be tolerant of opposing ideas?
Thanks so much, Michael!
It's even further.
It's important for the children to be raised in accordance with the truth.
Not just to be tolerant, but to be raised in a way that is correct.
To be shaped properly and oriented toward the truth rather than toward falsehood.
So it's even further than that.
And you ought to state your views.
In the proper media and the proper platforms.
I don't think you need to show up to Thanksgiving dinner wearing a MAGA hat, you know, dancing around, setting off fireworks for the conservative revolution or anything like that.
But if it's on your own social media page, if it's in your own book club, I don't know, a dinner with like-minded people, then of course you bring that up.
And then when you go to the family function, then maybe you're a little bit more diplomatic.
There's nothing wrong with being diplomatic.
You don't want to be a flatterer.
You don't want to be a liar.
You don't want to say things that aren't true.
But you don't need to be flamboyant all the time with your views.
Kind of funny to use the word flamboyant when we're talking about your opposition to the pride movement.
So I would speak the truth at all times, but you can be a little more bold and a little more subdued depending on the circumstances.
But I would never try to find a conciliatory middle ground between truth and falsehood.
That's where you're going to get into trouble because if you try to back away from your views, I'd say, well, no, I don't really mean that.
No, I actually, I kind of look, I sort of see, but maybe in the, then you're gonna look guilty.
Then you're gonna look like your views are wrong, which they're not.
If you're asked by your relative, you say, do you really believe that you don't believe in gay marriage?
You say, no, I don't.
I just don't think that's what marriage is.
I think that marriage essentially has to do with sexual difference.
And so, no, don't mean any ill will toward anybody, but that's just what it is.
I can't lie.
Then you're in a much safer position because they're not going to be able to argue with you and you're not going to seem nervous.
You're not going to seem like what you're doing is something shameful.
You're stating your views clearly, might even be persuasive.
Next question.
Hi Michael, this is the Shuckmeister.
I have probably the most important question to ask regarding the lore of The Michael Knowles Show.
There seems to be a reoccurring antagonist, and I was once again reminded of him during your interview with S.D.
Williams.
Who is Mr. McGillicuddy, and why does he want to steal my future trad wife away from me?
Thanks.
Love the show.
Well, Mr. McGillicuddy, you know he owns the widget factory at which your wife works so that you can get money so that you can pay another woman to raise your children.
That Mr. McGillicuddy is perhaps the defining man in our modern life predicted by James Burnham with the rise of the managerial elite in the earlier parts of the 20th century.
And now really has flourished where we live in a society that is undifferentiated by almost anything and especially sex.
And everybody's got to go work and just produce widgets to tick up GDP and then consume products rather than focus on things that don't have a price tag like family.
Mr. McGillicuddy is not a communist.
A lot of conservatives want to blame all the problems on communists.
And I've blamed Marx and Marx's acolytes for all sorts of issues.
I wrote a whole book about it called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
But there are other evils in the world besides Marxism.
There are other antagonists.
And Mr. McGillicuddy is a real insidious antagonist.
Because Mr. McGillicuddy, though he is liberal, is a capitalist.
Capitalism is a word that was popularized by Karl Marx, and capitalism is not great.
Markets are good, a flourishing economy is good, material prosperity can be a wonderful thing in its proper place.
But capitalism as the greatest, highest point of politics Makes conservatives no different than the mammon worshippers on the left that we deride and that we distinguish ourselves from.
That's who he is.
Next question.
Hey there, Big Mike, Smokey Mike, Sexy Mike, Dirty Mike, Media Matters for America's favorite quote-unquote failed actor.
I wanted to inquire a question for your answering pleasure.
I wanted to get some information on a topic you are well versed in.
Cigars.
Not marijuana, no.
If I wanted information on the Red Pitchfork Man's favorite crop, I would have just asked a goofy little leftist, but I digress, I digress.
I was hoping you could give me a general explanation about cigars, like what they're made of, what makes two cigars different, general information that's important to know for somebody trying to get into this.
And also, as someone who has dealt with asthma in the past, but it doesn't really affect me now, would it still be possible for me to get into this activity?
Really appreciate the response, keep up the good work, and God bless.
Oh, make sure to tell your folks I says hey.
Alright, good deal.
Bye now.
What a question.
What an amazing question.
I don't really know anything about asthma, so talk to your doctor, I guess.
If you're not asthmatic now, I don't see what the problem would be.
I don't really know the relation between tobacco and asthma anyway.
In terms of cigars, what are they made of?
They're made of tobacco.
They're made of tobacco leaves.
Unlike a cigarette which is made of chopped up cheap tobacco and chemicals and paper, cigar is all tobacco.
It's long filler tobacco.
It comes from different countries.
Cuba, most famously, but then because of the Cuban embargo and because the communists stole the crops and the plantations from the cigar makers, a lot of the great cigar makers left.
They went to places like the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, increasingly Ecuador.
Some tobacco is grown in Mexico.
Some of the best tobacco is grown in Connecticut.
Shade tobacco and darker broadleaf tobacco, which is very toothy, kind of nice, oily, juicy tobacco.
Though a lot of that tobacco now, there's a shortage of it because the Connecticut farms have sold to other places, so a lot of that is actually grown in Ecuador now.
The cigars taste different because you blend different kinds of tobacco together.
I've considered making cigars a bigger part of this show.
Because it's such a great pleasure, it's given me such great pleasure over the course of my life.
I've smoked cigars for the majority of my life at this point.
I try to in moderation, understanding the risks, trying to minimize them.
And I think it really has helped me.
It helps me to relax, helps me to think about things, wonderful conversations.
So we'll try to do a little bit more with cigars moving forward.
But today's Fake Headline Friday.
I want to get to some more questions from the member block.
